UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

International-Lawyers.Org called the Council to put an end to human rights abuses occurring in Palestine. In Gaza, unarmed civilians including children, medical personnel, journalists and persons with disabilities had been victims of live ammunition by soldiers, particularly during the great march protests. As all actions were taken with the intention to destroy Palestinian people, the Council was urged to investigate whether Israel was committing genocide against the people of Palestine.

“Since 16 July, the Israeli authorities have prohibited the entry of fuel into the Gaza Strip, in the context of tightened import and export restrictions… The recent developments have exacerbated the existing humanitarian crisis driven by 11 years of Israeli blockade that has raised concerns over collective punishment and human rights violations, alongside an unresolved internal Palestinian political divide…

“At least one hospital has been forced to shut down for a few hours, and services are being dramatically reduced at others. Given ongoing blackouts of about 20 hours a day, if fuel does not come in immediately, people’s lives will be at stake, with the most vulnerable patients, like cardiac patients, those on dialysis, and newborns in intensive care, at highest risk.”

… hospitals have reduced diagnostic, sterilization and cleaning services, increasing the risk of infections amongst patients. Elective surgeries are being further reduced… Additionally, the reduced functioning of water and sanitation facilities risks an increase of waterborne disease and outbreaks… In addition to further reductions in water supplies, this would also potentially lead to sewerage overflowing into inhabited areas.”

This is another one of those rare occasions when we archive a statement that doesn’t explicitly include the word genocide. We can only guess at the reasoning behind UN OCHA’s decision to use evocative words rather than legal terminology to describe the situation in Gaza, but we archive this statement because it marks another stage of deterioration in what we analyse to be Israel’s genocide against the indigenous Palestinian people.

We hope to see, in the very near future, statements from the United Nations that are less that of damage control, and more of a strategical outline for achieving accountability, and with that, an end to crimes on a mass scale.

Emergency fuel for critical facilities in Gaza will become exhausted within the next ten days, the United Nations warned today, noting an urgent need for donor support to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe driven by the energy crisis… Currently at risk are emergency and diagnostic services, like MRIs, CT and x-rays, intensive care units and operating theatres in 13 public hospitals; some 55 sewage pools; 48 desalination plants; and solid waste collection capacity… “Hospitals have already begun to close. Without funding, more service providers will be forced to suspend operations over the coming weeks, and the situation will deteriorate dramatically, with potential impacts on the entire population. We cannot allow this to happen.”

2017 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem; the longest occupation in recent history. For the Palestinian people, these were five decades of de-development, suppressed human potential and denial of the basic human right to development, with no end in sight.

… UNCTAD (2015) emphasized that for Gaza to be a liveable place in 2020, enormous reconstruction efforts were urgently needed in sectors such as health, education, energy, water and sanitation. However, the humanitarian and economic situation has instead worsened since then. According to the World Bank, Gaza’s economic performance over the past two decades has been the worst in the world.

… One of the harshest consequences of occupation is an unemployment rate that is persistently among the highest in the world. In 2016, unemployment remained extremely high, at 18 per cent in the West Bank, 42 per cent in Gaza and 27 per cent in the Occupied Palestinian Territory; more than twice the regional average (ILO, 2017; World Bank, 2017). However, as high as the official rate of unemployment is, it does not fully reflect the real depth of the problem and the attendant economic suffering and waste of human resources… If the risky jobs in Israel and settlements did not exist, the unemployment rate in the West Bank would be more than 36 per cent, not much higher than the 42 per cent observed in Gaza. That is, without the problematic and vulnerable employment in Israel and settlements, unemployment in the West Bank would be nearly as high as the extremely high level in Gaza. Therefore, despite the conspicuously worse conditions in Gaza, it is crucial that with regard to the labour market, conditions in the West Bank are no less grim than conditions in Gaza. The entire economy of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, in the West Bank or Gaza, is stifled and stripped of its capacity to produce jobs.

In the summer of 2012, UNICEF and UNRWA asked if Gaza will be liveable by 2020. At the time- five years into Israel’s siege, and post Israel’s 2008 and 2012 carpet-bombing campaigns- one might have been led to think that if the situation only had eight more stable years to go until apocalypse, then it probably doesn’t look too good already. What one might have missed is that Gaza in 2020, as in 2017, as in 2012, is what genocide looks like.

In 2012 the UN Country Team produced a report on living conditions in Gaza and predicted that based on the trends we were seeing then, Gaza was on track to become ‘unliveable’ by 2020. Sadly, as we check-in on those same trends again in this 2017 report, the deterioration has accelerated, spedalong not least by a devastating round of hostilities in 2014 from which we are only now starting to recover. In my fortnightly visits to Gaza I am constantly amazed at the resilience of a people who manage to get by despite such odds. For most of us, with electricity only 2 hours a day as was the case recently, and youth unemployment at 60%, the ‘unliveability’ threshold has already been passed.

International-Lawyers.Org called attention to the systematic violation of human rights of the Palestinian people by Israel, which warranted the continued attention of this Council. As every Member State of this Council was aware, each State had a responsibility to respond to acts of genocide and in light of this, an investigation should be undertaken to ascertain whether the actions of Israel reached the proportion of genocide.

Pressure has continued to mount on organizers of a major international conference on genocide to move the venue from Jerusalem… One of the scheduled conference speakers is Adama Dieng, special adviser on the prevention of genocide to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Last month, more than two dozen civil society and human rights groups from around the world published a letter urging Dieng to withdraw from the conference… Dieng did not respond to The Electronic Intifada’s requests for comment.

Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, told a news conference that Israeli policies bore “unacceptable characteristics of colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing”.

“Every increment of enlarging the settlements or every incident of house demolition is a way of worsening the situation confronting the Palestinian people and reducing what prospects they might have as the outcome of supposed peace negotiations.”

Asked about his accusation of ethnic cleansing, Falk said that more than 11,000 Palestinians had lost their right to live in Jerusalem since 1996 due to Israel imposing residency laws favouring Jews and revoking Palestinian residence permits. “The 11,000 is just the tip of the iceberg because many more are faced with possible challenges to their residency rights.”